10
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      VISION: A Six-Telescope Fiber-Fed Visible Light Beam Combiner for the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer

      Preprint

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Visible-light long baseline interferometry holds the promise of advancing a number of important applications in fundamental astronomy, including the direct measurement of the angular diameters and oblateness of stars, and the direct measurement of the orbits of binary and multiple star systems. To advance, the field of visible-light interferometry requires development of instruments capable of combining light from 15 baselines (6 telescopes) simultaneously. The Visible Imaging System for Interferometric Observations at NPOI (VISION) is a new visible light beam combiner for the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer (NPOI) that uses single-mode fibers to coherently combine light from up to six telescopes simultaneously with an image-plane combination scheme. It features a photometric camera for calibrations and spatial filtering from single-mode fibers with two Andor Ixon electron multiplying CCDs. This paper presents the VISION system, results of laboratory tests, and results of commissioning on-sky observations. A new set of corrections have been determined for the power spectrum and bispectrum by taking into account non-Gaussian statistics and read noise present in electron-multipying CCDs to enable measurement of visibilities and closure phases in the VISION post-processing pipeline. The post-processing pipeline has been verified via new on-sky observations of the O-type supergiant binary \(\zeta\) Orionis A, obtaining a flux ratio of \(2.18\pm0.13\) mag with a position angle of \(223.9\pm1.0^{\circ}\) and separation \(40.6\pm1.8\) mas over 570-750 nm, in good agreement with expectations from the previously published orbit.

          Related collections

          Most cited references16

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          Deriving object visibilities from interferograms obtained with a fiber stellar interferometer

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            The Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Conference Proceedings: not found

              An integrated-optics 3-way beam combiner for IOTA

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                2015-12-31
                Article
                10.1088/1538-3873/128/963/055004
                1601.00036
                c3fb730f-0328-49d4-ad7a-d947abda2e69

                http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

                History
                Custom metadata
                Accepted for publication in PASP 12/31/2015; 50 pages, 18 figures
                astro-ph.IM

                Instrumentation & Methods for astrophysics
                Instrumentation & Methods for astrophysics

                Comments

                Comment on this article